Tuesday, 29 November 2016

YANKEV YOSADE (JOKŪBAS JOSADĖ)

YANKEV
YOSADE (JOKŪBAS JOSADĖ) (August 15, 1911-November 9, 1995)

He was born in Kalvarye (Kalvarija), Lithuania.
His father owned a small textile factory. He attended in a Hebrew high school in Marianpol,
and in 1931 graduated from a progressive Yiddishist high school in Vilkomir (Ukmergė). He went on to studied humanities at Kovno
University. Until WWII he was active in
leftist Jewish circles in Kovno. When
the Bolsheviks later occupied Lithuania, he became an active contributor to
their institutions. When the Germans entered
Kovno, he escaped into Russia, served in the Red Army for three years, and was
later in Inner Asia. He debuted in print
with stories in Folksblat (People’s
newspaper) in Kovno (1930) and later contributed to: the Kovno anthology Glokn (Bells), Oyfgang (Arise) of 1933, Brikn
(Bridges) of 1937, Zamlbukh far literatur
(Collection for literature), and Bleter
(Leaves) of 1938, among others. He
served on the editorial boards of the journals Shtraln (Beams [of light]) and Kovner
emes (Kovno truth). He was also a
contributor, 1940-1941, to Shtern
(Star) and Emes in Vilna. He placed work as well in Eynikeyt (Unity) in Moscow and
elsewhere. His three-act play Itsik vitenberg (Itsik Vitenberg) about
the first commander of the Jewish fighting organization in the Vilna ghetto,
which he prepared for the publisher in 1947, was never published because of the
liquidation of Yiddish culture in Russia.
In the 1980s he reworked the original version of this play thoroughly
and published it in Sovetish heymalnd
(Soviet homeland) (Moscow) 8 (1989). After
WWII he began to write in Lithuanian (criticism, stories, and plays). He was living in Vilna from 1958.